Honestly, it truly saddens me that it has gotten to this point. I have been holding off on responding as I wanted to read all that has been said thoroughly, go back through conversations, review logs, all while working 40 hour weeks, taking a graduate level course in non-linear optimization methods for computing, trying to work on positive improvements for our team and the server, and all around trying to have some semblance of a life, so please forgive me for not prioritizing this after all the issues over the years.
I am going to preface this. Contrary to your false allegation, there is no standard for TLDR attitude, nor is there literally any way for you to substantiate that outside of the stories you constantly tell yourself. I assure you my comments will be constructive, however, you consistently spew crap against myself and the upper staff team, so you are in no position to be setting the ground rules for how this situation is going to work. We are not making character assassination posts - when you go around telling lies, falsifying narratives, and overall making accusations against people, posting facts and supporting evidence of your actions to support our decisions is the appropriate response. I will not be addressing all 26 claims, because quite frankly many of them are arguing on semantics, such as staff compensation. Helpme compensation does not scratch the surface of “payment” for the work done by upper staff. This argument was pointless. If you do your usual “I don’t like what you are saying so I’m going to ignore you and block you” (which you have done at least 5 times in the past 12 months, despite my continuous efforts to treat you with respect and gratitude for the help you have provided, which your very own “gotcha” screenshots throughout these posts actually prove), there will be no reason to entertain these situations further. You have a habit of operating in bad faith, which I most certainly can substantiate. Given you have no issue showing logs, I will do so.
To provide context into the various situations that this has occurred, here is a far from exhaustive timeline of events with Thendil, purely because I do not have the time or interest to go as in depth, given I do not have the same amount of free time. In the interest of post length, I also will not be going into great depths with screenshot evidence:
The first instance of this happened all the way back in November of 2020. Thendil was caught with a copycat server, in which he had heavily plagiarized from HelloMiners. The original bantopic was lost with old forums, but there are still fragments such as this:
Further evidence of this can be found here:
Not only did he copy the server, but his site was also strikingly similar to our old site, prior to the Russian hacker incident. Notice for example (for those who remember old forums) how much this looks alike:
In game it was a similar story, which all evidence can be found here: 2020-11-26_21.47.55.png - Google Drive
Specifically, here is an example of their chat and roles:
Upon banning him, he contacted me as I was asleep, promptly blocked me for not replying fast enough:
sending the following email to cakey that was also intended for Tedde:
As you can see from this initial case, there is a history operating in bad faith, misconstruing the truth to meet a narrative. Months later in January, Thendil was given another chance, being allowed back to the server.
As time progressed, Thendil was given more government roles because his contributions to the community were appreciated, and his support in running certain aspects for our team were also extremely helpful – to the point that he was offered a moderator role:
A few months later, due to ongoing disputes between Thendil and Cakey, with Cakey taking it too far, Thendil left the staff team. His screenshot of me saying sorry to see you go is not some sort of “gotcha”, I was simply trying to show you respect, the same way I do in majority of our interactions, both public and private.
Response to post
I am going to skip the first 4 claims, I have no reason to dispute them. Claim 5 is ultimately true, not false. Mistakes get made, but just as Nar made a mistake with removing someone’s sign, a mistake doesn’t really change the fact that it happened.
Claim 6 is actually true. An example of Thendil taking advantage of a lack of supervision is the highway in question. Thendil once again used one small snippet of conversation from 2013 to show that he was in his right to make the highway. As you can see in my message, I clearly stated that contracts were planned (which never came to fruition), and at the time of contract execution, that would be a good time to make a connection. This was not blanket approval to begin building up to the government highway.
Claim 7 is misconstruing the truth of the matter. Thendil was regioning large regions outside of SUD cities, including SUD railways, following their ongoing infra-organization dispute between Thendil’s STC/STD and SUD. He was regioning right up to the 200 block buffer, out of spite. Troll regions, which Satan as you said “strongarmed you” into unregioning. This worked in your favour, as they were clearly troll regions, and we have a plethora of evidence from that era from all of your interactions with beak, cake, albinary, satan, etc. that supports that. After this point in time, infra rules were overhauled, something you were party to, which included requiring registering of your highway design in order to have it owned and protected by government. Something you used your staff perms to do – region them by gov to protect them, without following the correct guidelines.
Claim 8 – thendil was blacklisted from gov roles. I created the developer role as a completely separate entity from staff and government. The purpose of the role was to be a background role, providing technical and developmental support. It was a great opportunity for you to shine in a way where you would not need to be primarily public facing, since you at times could be a public relations nightmare with your general behaviour. Additionally, not all decisions require a vote from all of staff. This is not a secret, its openly stated. Ultimately, the administrative team has the final say. It has ALWAYS had the final say. At one point it was a single person who called all the shots. Moderators have a large voice and a large amount of influence, but Admins have always and will always reserve the right to make decisions on behalf of the server. I hope that clears that up, and that there are no misconceptions left moving forward. A large amount of decisions are brought to a staff vote, Admins have the final say over all decisions, and reserve the right to make decisions as an administrative team.
Addressing your little aside, honestly this is just pure copium. First, we banned you for plagiarizing our server. Then we gave you another chance. Then we allowed you to build up rapport within the staff, taking government positions. Then, knowing your ongoing history of causing trouble with other players, we still gave you a shot at mod, because we saw your potential. Upon becoming mod, you became overzealous with your role, over-moderating a player who posted something in an unaffiliated discord, even going so far as to report them to the authorities. Despite this, I gave you another shot, and even gave you a pep talk:
Then after you left staff, I offered you opportunities to stay involved, with infra consultation to future development work. The reality is I tried so hard to give you so many opportunities, but you continuously burn the bridges I build for you.
Claim 9 - I gave you opportunities to get more involved, offering you a developer position, ignoring caution from other staff based on your history. Contrary to your claim, this was not regardless of any previous issues and due to your experience running a server. I did this because I believed in you, I respected that you had interesting visions for ways to improve roleplay aspects on the server, but yet you somehow have yourself convinced that everything I do is because I am targeting you and out to get you, along with the rest of my team.
Claim 10 – Nar is telling this from Nar’s pov. Satan’s statements of removing you from all positions led to that. Despite this, it was also communicated that given the admin teams’ potential plans for gov cities, gov city development was being put on hold, including auctions, plot sales, etc. March 2024’s decision was made for good reason, and your ability to refute the post was refused. You took away your chance to defend yourself when you blocked the entire staff team aside from Vikron.
I am not even going to address your hiatus claim because similar to 1 through 4, its really just shouting into the void. Nar was away due to school/holiday for a couple of weeks. You literally cannot fault him for putting his own life first. You may be chronically online, but most of the staff team are full time working, either as students or in the workforce. We are volunteers, we are entitled to step back when life needs to take priority. Nar began working on gov cities because we had a plan to revitalize all government cities, something we are still actively working on now. Even if you were operating rightfully, as I mentioned before – Admins have the final decision. The large scale plans to improve the government cities as a whole do not need to be justified to you, sorry to burst that bubble.
Again going back to the developer role. It was never even remotely stated that developers were equals to admins. Developers are a completely separate branch of staff from moderators and admins, working alongside the admin team to support in development goals. Developers are not full admins, because they are not given the same level of trust as admins are. Developers are given the tools to do what they do well, not to make decisions for the server on behalf of the staff team. It is clearly stated in the posting.
Claim 11 – fair. You did not take advantage to gain worldedit, you just continuously used it without checking in. You were under the impression that you didn’t need to, but you came to this conclusion yourself, never double checked, and that’s where the whole lack of communication thing comes in. Admins let other admins know generally what work they are doing, what projects they are working on. You were just doing it, not informing. In the future treat this as a learning opportunity for real life, ask for permission, not forgiveness when using any powers or doing any actions that other people do not normally have the ability to use/do.
Claim 12 – most of this I am not going to address re: shouting into void. The one thing I AM going to address is this:
Despite the continuous attempts to try and steer the narrative, the reality is the following. A channel has existed in the upper management discord since March 24th 2024, with extensive evidence, report reviewing from players, discussions and deliberations on how to address the numerous issues relating to you in the community and on the server. In this channel, the admin team actively discussing the punishments to be applied which you knew because of Vikron. You then sent him this before we could finalize, since you knew what was coming:
Claim 13 – Thendil was party to the changes to the infrastructure guidelines. Thendil continued to use his staff permissions to create regions to protect his highways on the government dime. Generally, with any other player, this would need to be done by a member of staff and approved for each expansion in accordance with the guidelines, however he was able to circumvent that. So yes, it is true that he continued on his highway project that he blanket approved for himself.
Claim 13 continued – your screenshots are misleading of our conversation. I have already explained why, but I will do it again. I was clear – this expansion idea was reliant on the new contracts for RC highway, which never came to fruition. As you were not a member of the infrastructure department at this time, you had no authority to grant further approval to yourself, which you had done anyways.
Claim 14 – I do not know the full extent of this, and given there are 26 claims, I am not going to dive into it.
Claim 15 – you are right in that there is no issue with you acquiring the plot, or really that you did auctions, aside from the fact that they were not brought up or discussed. Believe it or not, the expectation that you communicate when you are going to do auctions is not unprecedented. Here are two examples, mayors have never had complete autonomy from admins.
Claim 16 – I don’t really have much to say about most of this, but I want to point out the irony in a point of yours.
This is regarding beak’s railway network. You as the new lead railway technician at the time, claimed and still claim to not be bound by the decisions of the previous holder of your position. The same is applied to your highway. Your self approval was valid during your time as manager. The new administration chose not to uphold your previous decision. There is nothing you can do about that.
Claim 17 – I similarly don’t really have anything meaningful I can really add on this, since I am not the person who made the statement and am not connected to the situation.
Claim 18 – I mostly have nothing to add, except to once again point out that my suggestion for you to go about getting a contract to extend your highway up once the actual government contracts for the RC to gov highway were released. This never happened, and you never applied.
Claim 19 – once gain, resigning because you know you are getting fired, while technically is a ‘resignation’, will always be tracked as a demotion, given that that was the punishment you were trying to get out of by quitting when you did. You were not given the job to develop a government highway. You forfeited that role in 2023. Developer does not mean free reign.
Claim 20 – I had never given my approval. You are taking my liking of your ideas, and proposing times when you could have the opportunity to expand as me giving you the go ahead. It is a common theme throughout this all. Not all that I say and do is official statements or actions of the server and staff. Believe it or not, I am a player too. Even more shockingly – I still like your highway design. The reality is that it is not up to me when majority of the admin team was part of the decision on what to do:
While this is not the entirety of the admin team, it is a majority, and majority in fact rules.
Claim 21 is false, you are right in that I did not mention government or private plots you added yourself to.
Claim 22 – this is true. Here is an example of an executive decision made by you, that had to be retracted due to zero discussion with staff:
Claim 23 – yeah, there were periods of time where activity falls to very little. Once again, we are not all chronically online, we have real lives, we are working adults. HelloMiners does not pay the bills. It will always come secondary to our real obligations.
Claim 24 – This was not 1 strike and you are out. This was 4 years of constant attempts to give you opportunities to shine and overcome the issues and baggage that follow you. As mentioned, you were and are a serial blocker. You make it impossible to reasonable resolve issues. You run away from reality, and block the people you disagree with to avoid having a response to your messages.
Claim 25 – You were informed in the post that you had to come into compliance. From what I understand, you were further spoken with about it, based on this:
It is now July, and action is being taken. I concede that communication efforts on this were weak, however, given your history, your blocking of us, and no indication that the blocking was removed, tacked on with the repeated occasions of trying to contact you for whatever reason just to see I am blocked again time after time over the years, the lessened communication is not unjustified. Ultimately, a staff decision was made well in advance, and followed through with. It does not require you to agree with it, it is not in your power to control. We are long past that point now.
Claim 26 – I don’t have real comment on this, Nar is trying to improve HelloClan city in accordance with the plans admins have in place. Getting people to sell their plots for the overall goal of improving the city is not a sin in my eyes.
What have we learned from all this?
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too many lies to deal with. Oftentimes there is no use even attempting to argue with Thendil, and it honestly is not even worth the time
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staff don’t trivialise shock and horror as temper tantrums. You have shown not only the staff, but the community at large that you have a habit of throwing tantrums when you do not get your way. Not just staff, regular players in the community too.
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Being busy with life at this point in time is an acceptable excuse to carry on as staff. A large playerbase is increasingly becoming adults with real life responsibilities. Staff included. They are not preventing people from taking on roles, there is just a smaller pool of players. There is no major need to shake up the staff team when there is no big demand currently to warrant more moderators.
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there are no admins who are fishing to force a new server. I don’t even know where this baseless, moronic claim is coming from.
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there was never an abusive relationship between you and staff. There was countless attempts to give you the benefit of the doubt despite your incessant need to stir the pot, cause issues with other players, over-play your roles and responsibilities. You are responsible for the situation you find yourself in now.
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Tedde has not played an active role in day-to-day operations on this server for longer than you have been apart of this community. I don’t know where you get this idea from that you can get Tedde to step in and toss everything up. Tedde has entrusted myself, cheer, and others with managing the server, and keeping it running. The admin team has always been given the blanket trust to run the server as they see fit. Tedde is (get this), a working adult. In fact, an extremely successful one at that. To the point that he literally does not have the time or energy to concern himself with a Minecraft server, or a battlefield Vietnam server. He still pays for them, because once upon a time they were a big part of his life, and he has the means to do so. There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever, time to get over it.
Conclusion
You accuse us of not giving a crap about you, having no respect for you, and you especially love to drag myself and Nar through it. You have accused me of being harsh when disciplining/applying some sort of punishment for your poor behaviour, mistakes, poor interactions with others, etc. I have admitted that I can be harsh, and I have no problem affirming that notion. When we have members of staff acting inappropriately, I am harsh. I was harsh on Nar back in 2019, excessively so, because of mistakes he made at the time. I was harsh on Vihq, Satan, Vikron, etc. You are not special, the only difference is the frequency of issues you have had over the years. Hell, even when you were being discussed for promotion to moderator, it was noted as a caution by myself and others. My harshness however, still has a basis of respect. Multiple times over the past few years I have stuck my neck out for you, offering you olive branch after olive branch because I truly believed that despite all the issues, you had real potential to bring positive change. Examples include constantly allowing you to still have influence on infra guideline changes after you left all departments, backing you up when you were being targeted and falsely accused with lots of false statements regarding a plot in King’s city.
I understand that for you this is extremely personal (clearly), but make no mistake, I do not care about you enough for any of these crappy accusatorial tantrums you are throwing on a regular basis. These situations are never as deep as you drum them up to be, and the real problem is that no matter what we say, no matter what the response is – if it isn’t heeding to your twisted false-reality, it literally will never end with you.
There will be no additional staff responses to your antics. I will ensure that your highway report is resolved separately from this. Best of luck to you in your future endeavours.
Luc
TLDR: The fact checking is largely driven by false narratives. I have explained why, to the best of my ability, while also considering that I really do not care to keep entertaining this after years.